Further Education Learning Technology Action Group

Contribute to ETAG – Cluster 2

We encourage you to join the ETAG conversation and make a contribution via the main ETAG page. Suggestions are welcome from all for individuals, for institutions and for national policy. We also seek suggestions for unintended barriers erected by past policies, that could usefully be demolished.

Tell us what you think about: Cluster 2

On this page, we are particularly interested in Cluster 2 of ETAG, which focuses on two topics:

Students with sight & control of their own complex learning “big” data – #etag2a

Technology will be even more personal – #etag2b

What is this about?

Students with sight & control of their own complex learning “big” data – #etag2a

Highly effective institutions already use data to understand progress, set goals and discuss learning. But often the data is owned by the institution and not shared with students immediately. As with patients in health, we think students will have sight and control of their own very complex learning data. And that data will be rich, multivariate and powerfully diagnostic. They will understand their own data, be able to act on it directly, have a sense of “where I am” relative to others now, to preceding learners, to international competitors, to the younger learners behind them, and so on.

Of course this is underpinned with a whole debate about what do we mean by learning – this Pisa graph suggests that our enjoyment of a subject may be as important as our tested success in it for an economy’s, or a learner’s, future. Knowing how you compare to others and what “better” actually looks like should be important. Maybe rather than a debate about “Whose data is it anyway?” we should explore “how do we create student demand for ownership of their learning data”.

Technology will be even more personal – #etag2b

It will be more portable, wearable, printed, embedded whatever – the key thing here is that it will belong to the learners. We will be firmly in the world of Bring a Browser and not “use our system”, with a default of “always on everywhere” that is 24/7.

With wearable and personal, “powering down” or “we don’t use them here” will not be an option (“take off your smart glasses!?”) so the challenge for education is to take best advantage of the opportunity. We can’t “lock and block”, we can’t “ban and wait”, we can’t appropriate each technology with a “standard” acceptable version. Of course this means learning spills out significantly more into the “non institutional time” in family and community. But as it does so, the consequences of being “off line” at home, or having parents who were “off line” could be damaging. We use pupil premium to intervene for equity – should that include home connectivity? And how does “secure assessment” fit in a world of diverse personal ownership? What advantage can we take of the opportunity that personal ownership brings?